Seventeen new faculty join college

Nilay T. Argon joins the department of industrial engineering as assistant professor. Her research interests are stochastic modeling and analysis of production and service systems, and simulation output analysis. Argon comes to UW-Madison with a 2002 PhD in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Joseph Bisognano, director of the university's Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC), joins the Department of Engineering Physics as a professor. He received his PhD in physics in 1975 from the University of California-Berkeley and has held a variety of positions, including adjunct professor of physics and applied science at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, and detailee to the nuclear physics division of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. He became associate director of SRC accelerator development in 1999 and executive director in 2001. His research interests include accelerator physics, theoretical physics, and stochastic cooling phenomena.

Nigel Boston joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a shared appointment in mathematics, as a professor. He earned his PhD in mathematics in 1987 from Harvard University; his early work in number theory provided a key step in the celebrated recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. He conducted postdoctoral research at IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette, France and has taught at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Boston's research interests include cryptography, coding theory, watermarking, algebraic methods in filter design, number theory, and Galois representations.

Naomi Chesler joins the Department of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor. She received her PhD in medical engineering from MIT in 1996 and served a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia Tech and Emory University from 1996 to 1998. Her research interests include tissue engineering, cardiovascular disease, gene therapy delivery strategies, and hemodynamics.

Paul Evans, who received a PhD in applied physics in 2000 from Harvard University, is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering. He comes to the college as a postdoctoral member of Bell Laboratories' technical staff. Evans' research interests include X-ray diffraction and scattering, X-ray optics, ferroelectric and magnetic materials, and thin-film growth and characterization.

Ian A. Hiskens joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an associate professor. Previously, he was a visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He worked for the Queensland Electricity Commission and also was a tenured senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Newcastle, Australia, where he received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1991. His research interests include power system dynamics, optimal and nonlinear control systems, parameter estimation, computational techniques for hybrid systems, stability analysis and simulation algorithms for differential-algebraic systems, and robotics. He also is affiliated with the Power Systems Engineering Research Center.

Hongrui Jiang joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, and completed his PhD at Cornell University in 2001. His research interests include microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and nano-scale electromechanical systems (NEMS), packaging technologies for MEMS, biological applications of MEMS, microfluidics, and radio-frequency integrated circuit design.

David M. Lynn is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and is affiliated with the Department of Chemistry as well. For the last three years he was a National Institute of Health postdoctoral fellow in the chemical engineering department at MIT, working with Professor Robert Langer to develop and evaluate new synthetic materials for gene delivery and other drug-delivery applications. Lynn, whose research interests include polymer synthesis, biomaterials, gene delivery, controlled release, and high-throughput screening, received his PhD in organic chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1999.

Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma, is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2001 and worked for Conexant Systems and Jazz Semiconductor until August. His research interests include integrated circuits for high-speed communications applications, silicon and III-V materials and devices, SiGe-HBT based power amplifiers, nanoelectronics, quantum dot devices, and single electron transistors.

Katherine McMahon, who received her PhD in 2002 from the University of California at Berkeley in environmental engineering and water quality microbiology, joins the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor. Her research interests include environmental microbiology, biological waste treatment, environmental biotechnology, biochemical engineering, microbial ecology, microbial evolution, microbial physiology and water quality.

David Noyce, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, joins the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor. He also is affiliated with the Transportation Engineering and City Planning Program and the Midwest Regional University Transportation Center. Noyce earned his PhD from Texas A&M University in 1999, has been a consulting engineer, and has worked for the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Texas Transportation Institute. His research interests include transportation safety, driver behavior, driving simulation, traffic operations, geometric design, pedestrians and bicycles, and intelligent transportation systems.

Scott Sanders is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and also is affiliated with the Engine Research Center. He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2001 from Stanford University and studies optical diagnostics, combustion, diode-laser sensors, internal combustion engines, and industrial process monitoring.

Michael Schulte joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor. He received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1996 from the University of Texas-Austin. Formerly an associate professor of computer engineering at Lehigh University, he directed its Computer Architecture and Arithmetic Research Laboratory. Schulte's research interests include computer architecture, computer arithmetic, embedded systems, application-specific processors for digital signal processing and encryption, and VLSI design.

Darryl Thelen, whose research interests include biomechanics, dynamics, controls, robotics, human movement, and muscle mechanics, joins the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor. He earned his PhD in 1992 in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan was a postdoctoral fellow in the university's Institute of Gerontology. He also has worked at Hope College, Holland, Michigan; Stanford University's biomechanical engineering division; and Honda Fundamental Research Laboratories, Mountain View, California.

Paul Voyles is an assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering. After earning his PhD in physics in January 2001 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he was a postdoc at Bell Laboratories' materials research department. He also spent two years during his graduate work at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include atomic structure of materials including glasses and organic materials, behavior of impurities in semiconductors, and electron microscopy and spectroscopy.

Dennis Whyte joins the Department of Engineering Physics as an assistant professor. Whyte, who was a fusion research scientist at General Atomics, San Diego, California, and a research scientist at the University of California-San Diego, earned his PhD in 1994 from the Universite du Quebec, Montreal, in physics. His research interests include plasma and fusion science technology, experimental plasma physics, plasma-wall materials interactions, and experimental plasma diagnostic instrumentation.

Shiyu Zhou joins the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as an assistant professor. From January 2001 to August 2002, he was a research scientist and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he earned his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2000. His research interests include modeling, diagnosis, and control of large scale manufacturing systems.